BBC does story on L.A. Sub-Prime Shanty Towns.

The big question is why is this news in England and not here? Have I just missed all the coverage on it? If so, I am notalone.

A commenter on the Subliterate Cinephile blog that ran a post about this places the shelter in Ontario at a place named Camp Hope. While said commenter also gives some statistics, I don’t see them backed up by the story he linked to in response.

While I don’t doubt that the “Sub-Prime” angle was played up by the BBC, it’s still disturbing to see tent cities popping up in the Inland Empire. Is this possibly a direct result of the efforts to move the homeless from Downtown? Or is the homeless population booming?

7 Replies to “BBC does story on L.A. Sub-Prime Shanty Towns.”

If you travel to places outside the US and watch the news, you’ll be amazed and disgusted at exactly what the US press decides isn’t worth reporting about.

The whole problem is that in order to get access to the newsmakers, the news reporters have to depend on being in the good graces of those politicians.

Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, Raving Looney Monster Party, none of them want the dirty laundry aired and if a reporter decides to air it, suddenly they are no longer invited to the press briefing or junket or trip to hawaii, so they only report on the easy stuff…the ribbon cuttings and puppies.

Another part of the problem is that news is no longer about reporting the news, but about ratings and advertising and whatever other metric the big business decide to apply.

There was a great blog post written by a reporter for a major news outlet that deconstructed an entire news cycle showing exactly how these things happen…I can’t find it now :(

The Ontario tent city has been in the LA Times. In fact there is another article today about them only letting those stay who are Ontario residents. I have also seen this on the morning news, channels 2 and 7.

So, in fact this story has been in the local media. Only those who get their news from foreign sources don’t know about it.

As I tell everyone while playing the “I’m more green than you” game. I don’t have a car and I take public transit. I take the train and the bus, lots of times I meet people on the bus. In real life I’m a little way too friendly. I’ll talk to anyone who doesn’t smell too bad, even if they don’t have a house.

Anyways I was talking to this homeless-like guy and he was telling me how bad it was getting in LA and how lots of people were living in their cars and asked me if I thought that was a good idea. I was like I don’t know, but “Where dude, where do people in vans live?” And he pointed, so I went to see a place a little east of downtown like around First St past Bordello on the other side of the LA River.

Lots of homeless-like people living in vans. I’m not sure if you have a van if you’re considered homeless.

It’s pretty amazing that this is LA. We seem to be turning into one of those countries where everyone is either very rich or very poor. I’m one of the only middle class people I know anymore.

It seems like people either are getting very lucky with dead parents and becoming multimillionaires or they are sliding down the economic ladder to 1930s style poverty.

It amazes me that no one talks about it and talks all of this happy talk. This is not a happy time, it’s very horrible out there and it’s getting worse and that’s even taking the gangs out of the equation. Though maybe people who are having a hard time don’t necessarily have time to hang out on blogs.

I talked to this one lady on the bus one day and I was trying to give her advice on jobs and she told me she didn’t have a computer and you know at that point I didn’t know how to continue the conversation.

It’s irresponsible to claim this has much to do with the sub-prime mess.. this is a direct result of LA clamping down on the homeless – I’m surprised at how BBC played up the sensationalist angle. This is just a displacement of the homeless problem.. anyone who actually follows the news regularly won’t be surprised by this at all.

By definition, isn’t anyone camped in the tent city an “Ontario resident?” Does this mean that you have to have ID proving that before you became homeless you were previously homed with an Ontario address?